The growing importance of Islam in the world coincides with the growing interest by scholars in understanding Islam as a religion and its political and social influences. The geographic scope of Islam goes far beyond the Middle East, ranging from the Far East to sub-Saharan Africa.There is a vast diversity of Islamic movements and every country has its own distinctive pattern. But of the main categories of Islamic groups, only the Islamist political groups, the best-known in the West such as the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaida, Hamas and Hizballah, have been thoroughly analyzed and documented; but these are only a small portion of the variety and stance of groups. Indeed, the ‘Arab Spring’ has brought a resurgence of Islamic, as well as Islamist, civil society organizations.

This new four-volume set provides a comprehensive study of the other main categories of movements:

• Muslim non-political, non-Islamist groups, including charitable and educational organizations as well as the association of imams, courts, and so on. These incorporate the networks of the traditional Muslim institutions which, in most cases, actually run the communities and provide services to them;
• Muslim non-Islamist political groups, that is the efforts to create communal representational or communal interest groups, commonly called ‘moderate Muslim’ groupings;
• the non-political aspects of Islamist groups, that is the social welfare, educational, theologically oriented, and special interest organizations created by Islamist groups to spread their influence and enlarge their base of support.

This truly ground-breaking and timely work collects for the first time in one reference work the latest scholarship on a previously-neglected aspect of the Muslim political and social experience, and will be invaluable to researchers and students across a wide range of disciplines.